Publications

Take What You Can: Property Rights, Contestability and Conflict (joint with Thiemo Fetzer)Economic Journal Vol. 127 pp. 757-783ABSTRACT: Weak property rights are strongly associated with underdevelopment, low state capacity and civil conflict. In economic models of conflict, outbreaks of violence require a prize that is both valuable and contestable. This paper exploits spatial and temporal variation in the availability of land with title that is contestable by private actors, to explore the relationship between (in)secure property rights and civil conflict in the Brazilian Amazon. The results suggest that resolving this contestability of title at the local level could eliminate substantively all local land-related violence but might increase conflict in areas where title remained contestable.​​

​Working Papers

The Agricultural Roots of Industrial Development: Rural Savings and Industrialisation in Reform Era China For a non-technical summary see my piece at VoxEU. (Discusses a previous version of the paper.)ABSTRACT: Improvements in agricultural productivity are often claimed to aid industrialisation at low levels of development. However, empirical evidence for this is limited. This paper uses a natural experiment to show that China’s 1978 to 1984 agricultural reforms promoted industrial development by increasing the supply of capital. Variation in agricultural productivity comes from the fact that the reforms liberalised the planting of cash crops. Counties with land agro-climatically suited to those crops thus benefitted more from the reforms. Frictions in Chinese capital markets meant that rural savings were often invested locally. Consistent with a simple two-sector model linking the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors through the supply of capital, counties benefitting more from the reforms had faster post reform growth in savings, investment and non-agricultural output. Data from the 1995 industrial census also indicates that firms in these areas faced relatively low capital costs. Additional results indicate linkages through other channels cannot explain the growth in non-agricultural output. The results of this paper thus suggest that agricultural surpluses can provide an important source of capital for low income countries.

Family Size and the Demand for Sex Selection: Evidence From ChinaABSTRACT: In China, many fewer girls are born than would be expected given natural birth rates. This imbalance has worsened dramatically over the last 40 years. The roughly contemporaneous fall in fertility per woman is often mooted as a source of this apparent increased demand for sex selection: fewer births make it harder to have a son by chance. Despite this, causal evidence is limited. This paper exploits geographic variation in changes in fertility, arising as a consequence of China's agricultural reforms (1978-84), to provide this evidence. Specifically, I show that households living in counties that benefitted more from the reforms, increased their fertility relative to households elsewhere. I then show that these households are also less likely to engage in sex selection. These changes appear to have been due to higher local incomes interacting with the enforcement of the One Child Policy. The timing of the changes in fertility and sex selection are informative: while fertility increased almost immediately, the decline in sex selection only emerged from the mid 1980s---contemporaneous with the widespread availability of ultrasound. These results suggest that the dramatic decline in fertility in 1970s China, as well as the smaller decline due to the One Child Policy in the 1980s, may have had an important role in fuelling the demand for sex selection.